I've been looking at various speeches by people who attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference and there's a few amazing innovations to be seen.
The most interesting things I've seen are Blaise Aguera y Arcas's demonstration of Photosynth which is a way of pulling together photographs of places and mapping them onto a 3d map (you have to watch the video to understand it as I can't really describe it that well in words !). You can try out Microsoft's tech preview of it here.
Another interesting idea was Anand Agarawala's BumpTop user interface. Essentially, he's used his own, real life desktop as inspiration for a new user interface. This means that instead of having "flat" icons on a desktop, the icons are fully "malleable" - you can screw them into a ball, throw them at others, stack them up, pin them to the "walls" of the user interface, and make them larger and smaller. I'm not really sure what the practical applications of this type of user interface would be, other than for home users to have an interface which more realistically mirrors real life. For professional users, however, this type of interface would be confusing and make things difficult to find as it is such a change from the organised, regimented desktop presented by Microsoft and Apple (and not forgetting Linux !) - granted, these user interfaces aren't perfect but they work for the majority of people. (I'd still like to have a play with the BumpTop UI though !!!)
There's lots more videos on the TED site that I'm going to be looking at over the next few days, so watch this space !
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment